Jeff Bezos' Ex Gives Away Another $2B

Megadonor and novelist MacKenzie Scott announced almost $2 billion in donations to 343 organizations in a short blog post Monday, emphasizing her interest in supporting people from underserved communities. In her first post in nearly eight months, Scott showcased her donations to numerous funds as a “great resource” for giving. “They pool donations and spread them across a diverse group of smaller organizations working toward a common cause,” she wrote. “The funds we picked look for teams with lived experience in the issues they’re addressing.” Scott also repeated a promise first made in December last year to release a database of the organizations to which she's donated, the AP reports.

Her new list of donations includes several that have been previously announced, including $85 million to the Girl Scouts of the USA last month, $39 million to Junior Achievement USA in August, and $123 million to Big Brothers Big Sisters of America in May. In Monday's post, however, no donation amounts were listed. Phil Buchanan, president of The Center for Effective Philanthropy, said Scott’s recent gifts continue to show how well avoiding the traditional “top-down, donor-knows-best” philanthropic style can work. Scott’s focus on donations to pooled funds allow her to support smaller organizations doing good work in specific areas. The announcement Monday brought the amount she's said she's given to around $14 billion to some 1,500 organizations.

“If you’re trying to reach a very small organization in a particular community and you’re a larger donor, it’s wise to find an intermediary,” said Buchanan, whose organization plans, on Tuesday, to release a research report on the impact of Scott’s giving from the summer of 2020 through the summer of 2021. The Center for Effective Philanthropy studied tens of thousands of donations in that time frame and found that the median grant was $100,000. In that same period, the median grant from Scott was $8 million. “That’s a whole other order of magnitude,” Buchanan said. Ana Conner, co-director of Third Wave Fund, which received a $3 million grant from Scott to support its work for youth-led, gender justice, said that the donation will help groups that “fall through the cracks of philanthropy.” (Scott's billionaire ex apparently plans to follow her lead.)